ReCurrent: Behold & Belonging

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Announcer: This is a Getty Podcast.

[Quick steps down a street]

Jaime Roque: Early Saturday morning in Boyle Heights. A couple storefront gates are still down, the street not quite awake. And then—one building already sounds like it’s been open for hours.

Diego Torres-Casso: [Through door speaker] Go ahead and try opening.

Roque: Laughter, chairs sliding, all that noise means people are making things. That building is home to Las Fotos Project.

Torres-Casso: Las Fotos is kind of this resource space. A place where young folks are exploring creativity, exploring identity…kind of this hub for all of that.

Roque: [over Torres-Cassio speaking in the background] That’s Diego, the photography education manager at Las Fotos. Las Fotos Project began in 2010 to offer a safe space where teen girls use photography to speak their stories and explore identity. Students come largely from South, Central, and East LA—no gear or prior experience required. And the classes serve teen girls ages 13 to 18. But, when students turn 18, they age out and Diego starts hearing the same plea: “Can we keep going”? That’s the need.

Hello my name is Jaime and welcome to ReCurrent.

Roque: [knocks on door] Hey Christian!

Christian Morales: Oh, hey Jaime, how’s it going?

My name is Christian Morales. I’m the community engagement coordinator for the Getty Museum. I try to bridge the gap between the museum and communities all across LA.

Roque: Christian had Las Fotos Project on his mind. He drafted a quick email to Diego and Arlene—no pitch deck. Just this: what if we bring young women, already making work about identity, into a show doing the same?

The show was Behold, the Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons exhibition at the Getty: 35 years of her work on migration, memory, and identity, told through photographs, installation, video, and performance.

Morales: I quickly emailed Diego and Arlene. They were very receptive…they were totally open for it.

Roque: And why Las Fotos?

Morales: I see myself in these students. I want them to feel comfortable. I want them to feel like the Getty is a place for them.

Roque: That’s the “why”. Someone inside the institution sees a potential bridge for Getty and the community—and they decided to reach out. Campos-Pons’ work offered that perfect opening for a new connection.

Morales: The exhibition, it’s not just photographs. It’s three-dimensional sculpture works, it’s works on paper, a video component. She talks a lot about not only immigration but her identity as an Afro-Cuban Latin American person. We knew that with Magda's connection, not only to photography, but also to her identity being a woman of color in the arts, we wanted to partner with an organization that had a very similar type of focus. And I think the age range was also nice because they’re young adults coming into their own careers, into their sort of post high school age. It's a time of discovery where I think the Campos-Pons exhibition is a great exhibition for that because she speaks to a lot of those sort of themes.

[Guitar music plays]

Yeah, so Maria Campos-Pons was born in 1959. She’s the descendant of enslaved and indentured people. They were brought to work on Cuban sugar plantations, so she left Cuba in the 1990s for the US and couldn’t return home for more than a decade. In Behold, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons brings her and her family stories into the gallery. And she uses it as a lens to look outward. So the long shadows of slavery and contract labor, the daily work of motherhood, the paths of migration, and the spiritual practices that keep a lineage intact.

[Bass guitar riff]

Roque: In one room, ironing boards circle like an altar while images of women from different generations appear in light. In another work, a Black woman’s braids rise upward, threaded with red and white beads, as she steadies a stalk of sugarcane against a red background. It isn’t a style so much as a method: idea first; then the form that can carry it.

[Crowd chatter]

Arlene Mejorado: What we did was we created something we like to call the “Independent Study with María Magdalena Campos-Pons”.

Roque: [over Mejorado speaking in the background] Meet Arlene Mejorado, a lens-based artist in Los Angeles. She’s been teaching at Las Fotos since 2017 and is the teaching artist for this independent study.

Mejorado: So what was really great was we kicked off the class actually with meeting with the curator and doing a nice walkthrough of María Magdalena Campos-Pons show at the Getty.

Roque: That first visit was time to get immersed in all things Campos-Pons. The students learned how she builds meaning and how she transmits her life experiences into her art.

Mejorado: So, although Las Fotos Project literally is in the name, it’s a photography space, we wanted students to kinda become—to think, to prioritize what they wanna say, and then think about the medium or the way they are going to say it after. And that’s in the spirit of Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons because she talks about how in her work she’s not so concerned about, you know, ‘I’m a photographer,’ ‘I’m a painter,’ or ‘I’m an installation artist.’ She’s concerned with having something that she wants to express and then using the tools that are both at her reach or best to tell that message.

[Melodic music begins]

Roque: Permission to think of what you want to say and then pick how you want to say it is exciting and scary at the same time. It’s exciting because you have an open canvas, literally and figuratively, but also scary because of that same fact. It can be hard to lay down what you want to say in an open and honest way, when you’re afraid your message—and your art—will be judged.

To see what that looks like in practice, meet Wendy. She’s 21, four years with Las Fotos, and she’s aged out of the teen classes. Then, the 18 plus Getty independent study opened up. She applied and she got in. We met on a Zoom call for this conversation.

Wendy Cubillo: Yeah, so when I walked into the exhibit, I think the very first thing that came to mind was just how incredibly talented she was, but also the similarities that I saw within myself in her work. So I saw that she played a lot with colors, she played with a lot with all these different textures and these different materials in her photographs. I like to play around with different things like that to invoke different types of symbolism.

[Piano music begins]

Roque: And that was the first of several visits at the Getty. One of those visits was extra special—the artist herself was there.

Mejorado: You know when Campos-Pons met with the class, she just started speaking to the class in Spanish, unbothered about it. And so that was something that was really different and I felt like there was a bit of a radical sense to it, and then all of the class is mostly first generation, children of immigrants.

Roque: Christian was also in the room.

Morales: It got pretty intense and emotional in the room, the fact that they were speaking the same mother language. And I think for a lot of them, they saw themselves in her and it was maybe one of the first times where an artist exhibiting at the Getty Museum also has very similar backgrounds to them.

Cubillo: Meeting her was absolutely beautiful. She was so calm and she was talking to us in Spanish too, which was awesome. I came home—my mom’s usually home—I came home and I was like, Ma, this was so cool, you know, [laughs] meeting her was amazing. I mentioned to her that she was speaking in Spanish to us. I think that it was very powerful that she decided that the entirety of that meeting was going to be in Spanish, acknowledging our heritage, you know. And I think that was a really beautiful thing.

It was this really cool dialogue of her expressing more about her art and then also of when she was our age and there was a lot of transparency. We're all here as artists; she was very supportive.

[Guitar music plays]

Roque: Wendy and the group carry that energy home to Boyle Heights. Here is Arlene, their teaching artist at Las Fotos.

Mejorado: And so all of the students got to work a little bit outside of just traditional digital photography and we really encouraged them to try something that they haven’t done before. A lot of students have turned to family looking at the archives, looking at family photos, family archives. We’ve had students that have actually done portrait sessions with their family members here in the studio at LFP. One student, she’s been more interested in looking at people in her community, but not necessarily family, so thinking more about kinship in that way.

Roque: Those messages, they all converge around the themes found in Behold.

Mejorado: But I will say that a lot of students have chosen to think about the ideas around home, the ideas around geographical placement and displacement. The ideas around lineage and intergenerational experiences and traumas, even. And also thinking about memory and connection to land, and so these are all ideas that, seeing Campos-Pons, look at these ideas through her work has helped students kind of think about their own experiences and understand them better.

[Electronic music begins]

Roque: Those museum hours—and that Spanish conversation—start to shape their decisions. For Wendy, the main question is: what’s the right vessel for what I’m trying to say? So she gets to work: recording every part of her creative process.

Cubillo: [into a voice recorder] “Hi, my name is Wendy and I’m making this voice memo series documenting the process of…. [fades out]

Roque: That’s Wendy—in the middle of the making, and a little stuck on what the next move should be.

Cubillo: [fades back in] …and it deals with memories, it deals with our inner child nostalgia… and I'm just, yeah I’m finding a lot of pictures that honestly I hadn’t seen in years, and to me it’s crazy.

Roque: [over Wendy speaking] Wendy starts with a feeling, not a format—and that’s where she gets stuck.

Cubillo: [over Zoom] At first I knew the meaning behind it, but I didn’t know what medium to use. At first I was gonna create some sort of magazine with photos and then I was like, I kinda want to work with something that’s more immersive, not so much like a book.”

Roque: She even tries to imagine a vanity—you sit, look in the mirror, and let the piece talk back—but the right setup never shows up.

That’s when a memory from one of those visits to Getty and Behold snaps into focus—the room that did the talking for itself.

Cubillo: But I did get a lot of inspiration from the part of the exhibit that had the video piece and the ironing boards. I thought that was really cool how she had the video playing on the ironing table and I thought that was really inspiring because it was very immersive. So like you walked into this whole different world really, and it was dark and like everything was just like—you got to take in the feel of it. So that definitely inspired my own piece for this class.

Roque: Now that she knows the medium fits the message, it’s about building the thing she’s been seeing in her head.

Cubillo: So the tent itself is a children’s tent. It’s pink, so it’s a very soft pink color, princess drapes on it. And as you walk in, it’s…you would technically have to crawl inside, which is kind of purposeful because I wanted to evoke that childhood feeling. So I feel like when we are children you know, we are crawling around not really afraid to really get messy, you know.

Roque: The aim is to show the work and let you step into the feeling it carries. If that feeling sounds familiar, it’s because she’s chasing the same immersion from Behold—but making it hers.

[Orchestral music begins]

Cubillo: The inspiration behind the tent was kind of that same feeling of being immersed into a whole different world. So what I was hoping with that was that people could essentially go inside of the tent and look up, and as they were looking up, they would see these photographs and just not only see, I guess, my story of growing up but also think of their own stories.

Roque: Her artwork is ready, and the next step is a presentation at Altura LA, a gallery in Lincoln Heights, where Wendy and her La Fotos cohort, who began as guests inside María Magdalena Campos-Pons’ Behold at the Getty, are now hosting their exhibition.

[Crowd chatter]

Cubillo: Everyone’s project was so different, but also blended so well together. It was this feeling of just, like, accomplishment, where you’re just like, oh, wow. Like we worked on this for months, and then we finally got to see it in a gallery, in a gallery space.

Roque: The support is real—and so is the vulnerability. But then what Wendy hoped for happened. Strangers leaned in, and some even interacted with her work.

Cubillo: Having projects like this almost feels like you’re naked almost. 'cause it’s like you're putting yourself out there and you’re just like, okay, now everyone can see what I’m feeling now. That’s kind of scary. But at the same time, it's like a—it's a cool feeling 'cause you're kind of just like I did this, I did it.

Roque: Wendy and the other Las Fotos students had put their deeply personal projects on display and survived.

Wendy: There was a moment in which the girls and I, we went up on this little like—'cause they have a little balcony up there and we were saying thank you to everyone who was there and, kind of nervous, but here we go, we're gonna do it. [laughs] Everyone was happy, you know, they were clapping.

[Orchestral music begins]

Roque: We started on César Chávez Ave. in Boyle Heights and then went across the city and up the hill to the Getty, into Behold, and watched a great artist, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, model a way of working: meaning first, then the vessel. And the students didn’t come to copy her style. They came to hear their own voices louder. Identity, lineage, migration, memory—said in whatever form can hold these big ideas. And then something important happened: the museum exhibition didn’t just stay in a building on a hill. Las Fotos came up the hill and then took it off the hill. Yes, Behold was an exhibition; yes, it’s archived online with photos and a page on Getty’s site. But the real meaning is the show lives on in the members of Las Fotos. The inspiration from this experience goes with Wendy and the cohort into whatever art they make next and into who they are—the way they carry themselves, express themselves, and identify themselves. I’ll give Wendy the last word on the power of María Magdalena Campos-Pons.

Cubillo:  I think her work had a lot of emphasis on emotion, but also being very unapologetic about it. So just being like, all right, I feel this way and this is what I feel, you know, and just putting it out there and not being afraid to be seen or heard. Seeing someone be vulnerable in a sense, you know, and put that vulnerability up on the museum walls, that is very powerful. There’s nobody else that can, you know, do what you do or live the life that you’re living. I think instead of focusing on what other people are doing, it’s just like, be true to yourself.

[Theme music begins]

Roque: Thank you for joining me on this episode of ReCurrent. ReCurrent was written and produced by me, Jaime, with creative support from Zoe Goldman. Our executive producer is Christopher Sprinkle, and for transcripts, images, and additional resources for this episode, visit getty dot edu slash podcast slash recurrent.